Harvard historian and New Yorker writer (and Central Massachusetts native) Jill Lepore has an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education that's interesting about, among other topics, how big government hurt higher education:
The academy is largely itself responsible for its own peril. The retreat of humanists from public life has had enormous consequences for the prestige of humanistic ways of knowing and understanding the world.
Universities have also been complicit in letting sources of federal government funding set the intellectual agenda. The size and growth of majors follows the size of budgets, and unsurprisingly so. After World War II, the demands of the national security state greatly influenced the exciting fields of study. Federal-government funding is still crucial, but now there's a lot of corporate money. Whole realms of knowing are being brought to the university through commerce.
I don't expect the university to be a pure place, but there are questions that need to be asked. If we have a public culture that suffers for lack of ability to comprehend other human beings, we shouldn't be surprised. The resources of institutions of higher learning have gone to teaching students how to engineer problems rather than speak to people.
[On getting her doctorate at Yale]:
Like any Ph.D. program, what you're being trained to do is employ a jargon that instantiates your authority in the abstruseness of your prose. You display what you know by writing in a way that other people can't understand. That's not how I understand writing. Writing is about sharing what you know with storybook clarity, even and especially if you're writing about something that's complicated or morally ambiguous. Also, I like to write about people who are characters, who have limbs and fingers and toes and loves and desires and agonies and triumphs and ages and hair colors. But that's not how historical writing is taught in a Ph.D. program.